Bush Administration Launchs Investigation of Former Treasury Secretary O'Neil

You and your unreliable sources, Sam.

 

I (me specifically) have never made the oil-only argument.

And there is a bit of difference between just money for an individual and money used to acquire and sustain power. What we're seeing in the Iraq contracts is a joining of the money and power in a way that is new (at least to the post WWII US)... big contracts, kickbacks to the campaign, more power longer.

 

Just goes to show that even whitehouse.gov is not immune from hating america. I imagine the renowned literary figure and master of arts and letters, Sir Orson Scott Card, would have choice words for whitehouse.gov on the issue of patriotism should he be presented with the opportunity....

 

Damn Glynch, way to stay young! I had you pegged as late-20's or early 30's.

 

By the way, it looks like O'Neill isn't as tough as he sounded a day or so ago. He backtracked quite a bit on the Today Show this morning and looked scared. Chris Matthews said it looked like something out of the Godfather movies.

 

I am truly surprised that SamFisher would choose to *extend* The Stradivarius Conquest in this manner. This sort of ex post facto debating reminds me of the ol' backyard basketball game with the loser begging for a best 2-out-of-3 then a best 3-out-of-4. A defeated man, his only hope is to try to resuscitate the battle and hope for an alternate outcome. Desperate people must humble themselves to endure this pitiful level of BEGGING.

 

I can't believe that this thread already has 106 replies but here's my .50 cents:
1. He is nothing more than a disgruntled employee lashing out at his former boss. He got fired for chrissakes, so what do you expect him to do, be all warm and fuzzy? Of course he's going to badmouth the adminstration that gave him an embarassing boot out the door, "don't let the door hit cha where the good Lord split ya" type firing.

2. I think it is humorous how every single liberal here gets whipped into a froth over every single little piece of "evidence" that points to some wider conspiracy about Bush. Granted, I don't like the man either (obviously for different reasons on my side: he's a sell-out to his core beliefs), but trying to pin the scandal tail every 10 seconds on Bush's donkey is getting to be a tired ploy. Watergate came and went and thanks to Nixon, we got years of a Democratic Congress that did its best to increase its own power by bloating the entitlement monster and thus making more people dependent on it as a vote-buying gimmick.

3. Paul O'Neil is a nobody. No one, outside of the rabid leftist Bush-haters, is hanging on his every word. In a few weeks, he will go away like every other "scandal" that the libs have tried to pin to Bush. It is much ado about nothing. As for the Bush administration saying that he may have compromised classified material, it's morbidly hilarious that you liberals who said that I was so "cavalier" about national security when the whole "spy cover-blowing" scandal broke about the Niger nuclear material. But when it is someone who you want to use to go after Bush, it is just sour grapes, a Godfafther-type revenge ploy.

I admire the gusto with which you doggedly pursue Bush with a Javertesque sense of the absurd, but sometime, you're going to have to give it a rest. All of the liberal candidates are, to quote Ace Ventura, "leee-whoooooo-zersssss!!!!" I have a better chance of boinking Brittney Spears and Christina Aguilera simultaneously than any one of those nine turds being elected President of the U.S.

 

Dammmit, I had the perfect bullsh-t .gif but it won't make it through the censors.

 

Show me a transcript...

 

Show me a denial.

 

It was you who said, "What Major said."

He makes it sound as if there is some transcript floating around rather than a narrative recreation by O'Neill.

 

Show me a transcript...

The transcripts were what were used to get the quotes cited in the book. This was fairly widely reported, including in the articles posted on here.

For example:

<I>“He says, ‘Didn’t we already, why are we doing it again?’” Now, his advisers, they say, ‘Well Mr. President, the upper class, they're the entrepreneurs. That's the standard response.’ And the president kind of goes, ‘OK.’ That's their response. And then, he comes back to it again. ‘Well, shouldn't we be giving money to the middle, won't people be able to say, ‘You did it once, and then you did it twice, and what was it good for?’"

<B>But according to the transcript</B>, White House political advisor Karl Rove jumped in.

“Karl Rove is saying to the president, a kind of mantra. ‘Stick to principle. Stick to principle.’ He says it over and over again,” says Suskind. “Don’t waver.”
</I>

Note the nice little bolded area. This isn't some guy reciting a conversation from 2 years ago from memory.

<B>
1. He is nothing more than a disgruntled employee lashing out at his former boss. He got fired for chrissakes, so what do you expect him to do, be all warm and fuzzy? Of course he's going to badmouth the adminstration that gave him an embarassing boot out the door, "don't let the door hit cha where the good Lord split ya" type firing. </B>

Interesting. So if we have to discount anything said by someone fired by Bush, he just has to fire anyone who disagrees with him, and then Bush can never be criticized for anything. Brilliant!

 

What Major said.

 

Show me the transcript don't just alledge that there is/was a transcript.

Major, you can carry anything you want to an extreme, but I don't think it would be unheard of to take with a grain of salt what a departed employee has to say that is of a critical nature.

 

***News Flash***: British Foreign Affairs Committee Launches Investigation on scientist David Kelly...

...David Kelly now "silenced..."

Chilling, isn't it?

 

Question:

To what degree to see possible ulterior motives for this war from the administrations's POV, and how many grains of salt to you use when taking in their statements on same?

 

Show me the transcript don't just alledge that there is/was a transcript.


WTF? So if I don't physically have a copy of a document that was stated to be used, I can't argue it? You'll believe Bush when he says "we have evidence of WMD" without any questions, but when its publicly reported that a transcript IN AN AUTHOR'S HAND states something, you won't believe it unless you see the document yourself, even though making up a statement by Bush and claiming its in a US government document would open him up to all sorts of legal issues. Nice.

Anything one person says is taken as fact without confirmation; anything disagreeing with that must be proven only with access to first-hand sources that people don't have direct access to.. no point in trying to discuss anything with you under those standards.

 

Missed this first time around....


"According to a Pew Center study, 85 percent of Republicans support the war in Iraq, 82 percent believe that pre-emptive war is justified, and 72 percent believe the U.S. is justified in holding terror suspects without trial."


The first 2 are predictable and sad. The latter is incredible and frightening.

72% of Republicans are a ok with ignoring basic human rights simply because a guy has been accused of being a terrorist!?!?!?

I've been away a little bit...did Republicans all go mad in that time!?!?!? Guilty by accusation!?!?!?


God we're going to hell right quick...

 

Leaks are starting to spring...
___________

Corroborating O’Neill’s Account
Official Confirms Claims That Saddam Was Bush’s Focus Before 9/11

By John Cochran
ABC News


Jan. 13
— President Bush ordered the Pentagon to explore the possibility of a ground invasion of Iraq well before the United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, an official told ABCNEWS, confirming the account former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill gives in his new book.


The official, who asked not to be identified, was present in the same National Security Council meetings as O'Neill immediately after Bush's inauguration in January and February of 2001.

"The president told his Pentagon officials to explore the military options, including use of ground forces," the official told ABCNEWS. "That went beyond the Clinton administration's halfhearted attempts to overthrow Hussein without force."

In The Price of Loyalty, O'Neill says that from the very start of his administration, Bush was focused on ousting Saddam. Bush says that his policy at the time was merely a continuation of the Clinton administration's stance. White House aides have suggested O'Neill, whom Bush fired in December 2002, is merely trying to sell books.

Both the official who spoke to ABCNEWS and O'Neill have acknowledged that Bush had not yet made up his mind for a ground invasion at the start of his administration, but they say officials were told to find ways to get rid of the Iraqi leader.

"Getting Hussein was now the administration's focus, that much was already clear," O'Neill says in his book.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld disputed O'Neill's account today. "I don't know what meetings he could have been in," Rumsfeld told reporters during a Pentagon briefing.

Classified Documents?

A briefing paper for O'Neill — and obtained exclusively by ABCNEWS — directed him to work on "keeping Saddam's finger off the trigger" by stopping imports of military technology. The Treasury Department is now investigating whether O'Neill took classified documents for the book. He says he did not.

"I don't honestly think there's anything that's classified in those 19,000 documents," O'Neill said on NBC's Today Show today.

Regardless of whether the book uses classified documents, it has been a headache for the White House. O'Neill insists he did not intend to cause the president any embarrassment.